A Little Bit of Armoured Support for the Soviets.

This is my first attempt at building and painting some armour for my Bolt Action Soviet army; a T34 with 76mm gun from Warlord Miniatures. When you've never done one of these before, it's quite a daunting prospect, especially when you look on-line and see what wonderful examples there are out there done by people who seem to know every nook and cranny of these mechanical monsters.

The Warlord kit comes with all sorts of options for different versions of the T34, so your first decision is to choose which part of the war you want your tank to fit into.

Once that decision has been sorted out, you then need to make sure that you choose the rights bits from the sprues to fit the model you want to make!

Building the kit took a lot longer than it probably should have done but I was extra careful about making sure that everything was in the right place. At one point, I removed the tracks because I was convinced that I had glued them too high on the model.

As this was my first attempt, I decided that I would keep the model as simple as possible and refrain from adding bits of stowage or other additional baggage. Now the job is done, I sort of think I ought to have been a bit more adventurous and added more, but I did have a go at using a washing technique that I hadn't attempted before. While I was browsing the internet for help with building the model, I came across a company called Flory Models, who produce a range of washes which are water based but have their colour provided by the addition of clay rather than ink.

The weathering washes cost £5.99 a pot, so they aren't cheap, especially when you are only planning to build a single model. Flory do some very useful video clips showing how to use the washes, which was really helpful, as the process involves applying the mixture and then wiping the excess back off again, after it has dried, to reveal the highlighting that you have done underneath! I like the Dark Dirt, as it provides a really subtle layer of weathering, but I think I still need to work on the Rust, which is much more dramatic in its effect.

Warlord provide a set of decals with the model, consisting of red and white numbers of various sizes, red stars and some patriotic slogans... I let my son choose from the three slogans available and, of course, he went for the one which says "Kill the Fascists!" 

The decal set also includes some formation insignia, but the one I wanted, the 9th Tank Corps, is not available. I might yet have a go at painting my own if I can find a space somewhere on the bodywork to apply it. The decals are fiddly, of course, but go on fine with the use of a little Micro Sol and a lot of patience.

So, as my T34 drives boldly off to the front, I am now planning to build the BA 64 armoured car that Santa brought for me on Christmas Day. Hopefully, the experience of experimenting with those Flory washes will reap its reward on this next model to join my Soviet army.

A Soviet Sniper Team.

Apparently, somewhere near half a million men and women were trained as snipers by the Red Army during World War Two. One of them has arrived to give a little specialized marksmanship to my little Soviet Bolt Action force.

Somewhere around two and a half thousand Russian women served as snipers on the Eastern Front during the Second World War and I would have liked to portray my sniper as one of those female heroes of the Soviet Union but, as I built my team from the standard infantry sprue, I have had to field my sniper as a Vasily Zaytsev rather than a Lyudmila Pavlichenko.

The sniper is armed with a Mosin-Nagant M91 rifle, fitted with telescopic sights.

The sniper's assistant is armed with a Tokarev pistol and a PPSh submachine gun to lay down some covering fire if the pair get too close to the enemy!

I decided to put the sniper on one of the large oval bases intended for the prone firing figures, so that I could give him some kind of cover to conceal himself behind. I initially thought about putting him behind some large barrels, but the ones I have were too big to fit on the base with the figure as well. Sat at the back of my painting shelf in the garage, is an old tin full of stones from our local pet shop and intended to be used in an aquarium and they offered an opportunity to try my hand at a bit of dry stone walling!

I toyed with the idea of putting both figures on the prone figure base, but decided against it as the whole vignette would have looked too crowded. This figure has a German helmet fastened to his waist belt; I can't decide whether this is just a souvenir taken from one of the sniper's victims, or a useful bit of kit used to make approaching the enemy a little less risky. Damn sneaky these Ruskies!

Covering the main man's back... armed with multiple weapons and a keen pair of eyes, the sniper's number two performs an essential role in the job of picking off those German officers and other key personnel... including those enemy snipers!

An Ancient Beast Stirs in the Heart of Cumbria!

Oh Victrix! Why dost thou tempt me so?

Well, I just can not believe this!

Gaius Julius Civilis and his wailing ladies.

My absolute favourite army of all time is definitely the Germanic army of the Batavian Revolt against the Roman Empire in 69A.D. If you have followed this Blog for a while, you might remember a cluster posts a couple of years ago when I was excitedly cobbling together figures for Julius Civilis' army, mainly, Warlord Games and Wargames Factory, with a few Black Tree Design thrown in for good measure. I loved (and still do) the Black Tree figures but the Wargames Factory offerings were little more than shapeless blobs of plastic and I got more than slightly miffed, when I discovered that the Warlord Games 'Warriors of Germania' set was just a re-hashing of previously released sets of Celtic warriors. There were a number of issues with the Warlord Games set, not least that it included a number of metal bare chested torsos, which made the figures top heavy when attached to the plastic legs!

Although I tried my best to love my Batavian rebel army, the figures just weren't good enough to do justice to what is a brilliant army to build. You have the wild and woolly Germanic types, always a treat to paint, backed up by cohorts of Roman Auxiliary infantry and cavalry and, as if all this were not enough, there were two Roman legions involved in the rebellion as well, albeit somewhat reluctantly. Even a butterfly painter like me couldn't get bored putting this army together.

Sadly, the project ground to a halt and I reluctantly moved onto pastures new... until now that is! It appears that those tempting Johnnies at Victrix Miniatures are planning to turn their digital designing wonderfulness upon some ferocious Germanic warriors. If previous Victrix offerings are anything to go by, then they will be top dollar and will certainly knock the Warlord Germanised Celts and the Wargames Factory blobs into an embarrassing cocked hat.

The very best head on offer in the Wargames Factory German Cavalry set.

The digitally designed heads for the upcoming Victrix Germanic Warrior set... and these are just the ones from the Command sprue!

Suddenly, I'm all of a tingle again at the prospect of building a Batavian Revolt army, but this time with figures that are truly worthy of those magnificent men of Germania Inferior.

My only request of Victrix Miniatures is that they hang on long enough for me to finish my Bolt Action Soviets before putting them up for sale.

Bolt Action... Цель достигнута

After I finished my first Soviet LMG squad for Bolt Action, I set myself the target of completing a second LMG squad and an SMG squad (that's a grand total of 30 PBIs!) before I started messing about with other peripheral stuff like officers, artillery, tanks and the like. The theory being, that once I started modelling the supporting cast, I would struggle to get back to the bread and butter, nuts and bolts, hard core of the army.

Well, apart from one small lapse, when I just couldn't resist building and painting a two man crew for an anti-tank rifle, the target has been achieved! On the afternoon of Saturday 24th November 2018, the 30th Soviet infantryman rolled off the painting table and three squads were complete. Less than three months passed from first starting them to the last brush stroke, and, considering that only one week of that was holiday, that is probably the greatest number of figures painted while going out to work every day! Two squads needed basing and that was done over the rest of the weekend.

One strategy employed in achieving the target was to leave the tank and the other supporting troops wrapped up in the boxes that Warlord posted them in when they were ordered! Out of sight, out of mind seems to work!

For the past couple of months, I've done really well to keep focussed on building and painting troops for my Soviet platoon, even though Warlord almost managed to drop a massive spanner in the works by announcing the release date for their 'Cruel Seas' naval game, just as I was coming to the end to painting my SMG squad.

I spent way too much time watching John Stallard on UTube and browsing pictures of coastal forces hardware, but the fact that there was nothing that I could actually buy and paint kept the brushes dipped in Russian Uniform Green. A good job, as it turns out, that the Cruel Seas release date was December rather than November.

Hopefully, things ought to get a little less stressful now and I can concentrate on the smaller, more enjoyable, tasks of building and painting the supporting cast. The Lieutenant and his side-kick are already on the bench and I'm experimenting with ideas for something a bit unusual for the sniper team.

And here's a sneak preview of the lieutenant, struggling to get his map orientated properly, and his mate, who appears to have strong views about which way is west!